News: “Flying is like good music: it elevates the spirit and it's an exhilarating freedom. It's not a thrill thing or an adrenaline rush; it's engaging in a process that takes focus and commitment." - Harrison Ford

Is anyone else perturbed by the stickiness of high avgas prices in the face of the dramatic and continued drop in the cost of crude? Does anybody here care? No one else seems to have raised the issue. Why is there no competition? Some body/entity is laughing all the way to the #$!@%*+! bank -- Damn them!

100LL price went down at Jefferson County 0S9 recently- about $5.30 a gallon vs $5.80 about 5 months ago. E10 car gas around here went way down, was $2.20 or so a gallon at QFC, but is back up about 20 or 30 cents now. E-zero car gas is $2.70 at Cenex Co-op earlier this week vs $3.10 two months ago.Fuel prices cycle up and down like the temperature, it doesn't do much good to get worked up about either one.

Part of the problem is that the average FBO has to buy in bulk at a price and then has to recover that price. Unlike your COSTCO gas station that has a tanker full of gas come every couple of hours to refill it, the FBO can't really change the price until it has sold the gas. Add to the fewer hours flown in the winter due to the weather and the generallack of flying year around and you have a recipe for higher fuel prices. Most are trying to keep the margins down, but there is a limit. Until a different business model works with this new reality, that's the way it is.

Regardless of how often the refinery makes a batch and how often it is delivered, it never really goes down like auto gas. It's a very annoying fact. If you tracked by percentage the drop in auto gas you will see that avgas in the NW never tracks, even over very long periods of time. If you want to be really frustrated, look at fuel prices in the south! As always, the Pacific Northwest is the most expensive area in the country to buy avgas, by far.

This is the way I understand it, after having done some reading on this:

Tetraethyl lead is expensive. It is made by only one producer worldwide. They control the price. TEL injection in the distillation process is expensive. The total demand for 100LL gas is a tiny fraction of the total demand for refined petroleum products, making the cost of refining and distribution, .......expensive, relative to other products of the distillation process! Add to that the money being plowed into what will eventually (and quite literally) mean the total ELIMINATION of 100LL from the product-line (have you ever heard of PAFI?) and you can see that there is absolutely no incentive for 100LL producers to lower their wholesale price to their customers. And, you know the old saying about the **** rolling down hill.